The Fat Duck Melbourne opens, Heston Blumenthal speaks

Author: Michael Harden
Photography: Julian Kingma

4:38PM, Feb 3, 2015

After months of slow-drip announcements, a ballot with 250,000
people trying to secure one of 14,000 seats, stories of ballot
rorting, the migration (and housing) of 70 chefs, waiters and
sommeliers from the UK, announcements of a $525 per head price tag,
and the breathless Willy Wonka-esque anticipation over who would
score the last of the golden tickets, it's finally happened. The Fat Duck has opened in
Melbourne.

The former Breezes restaurant on the third level at Crown Towers
has been given a thorough going over, starting with a dramatic
entrance via a darkened tunnel with what appears to be a small door
at the end which is really a small door-sized video screen playing
images of the kitchen team in action. Alice in Wonderland
comes to mind. At first it seems as though you've come to a dead
end and then a black glass wall slides open and you're in.

The room is dark-hued, lit dramatically, carpeted luxuriously and
furnished with curved bone-coloured booths, purple upholstered
chairs and spacious tables dressed with meticulously ironed linen.
One wall is all geometrically framed glass with views over
Melbourne's CBD. Another sports a jigsaw, partly completed, that
will become whole over the six months of the Fat Duck's Crown
tenure, with every guest adding a piece to the puzzle. On a third
wall is another Wonderland touch - a giant fob watch that counts
down the restaurant's days in Melbourne, stopping after six months,
after which it'll be shipped back to the original restaurant in
Bray as a memento.

On day one, minutes before the first service, while TV crews
filmed and the smartly turned-out staff were the briefed for the
final time, Heston Blumenthal threw himself onto a seat at the
kitchen-side chef's table (a one-off in Melbourne - the Bray
restaurant is too small to accommodate one) to tell us about this
incarnation of his most famous restaurant.

GT: Is the multi-course menu here about The Fat
Duck's greatest hits or are there new dishes exclusive to
Melbourne?
HB: There will be at least one dish that's new but there will be
some changes to all the dishes just because we're using mostly
Australian produce. All the dishes at The Fat Duck are in a
constant state of evolution anyway. Dishes like the bacon-and-egg
ice-cream, the snail porridge, the Sounds of the Sea are always
being changed as we change, and I see this migration of The Fat
Duck to Melbourne as just another part in the narrative of those
dishes. When they return to the UK, they will be changed, too, like
a new chapter.

GT: Is this version of The Fat Duck like the most
extreme form of a pop-up restaurant?
HB: It's not a pop-up and we've tried from the beginning to make
it not like a pop-up. What it is, is a restaurant within a
restaurant. We have the first layer, which is The Fat Duck, and
then, underneath, there's the second layer which will be the
permanent restaurant, which is Dinner.

GT: You've brought staff and furnishings with
you, what about The Fat Duck cellar?
HB: It's a combination of stuff from our cellar and local wine. At
first I thought it would be amazing to have a list of only
Australian wine. It seemed weird to me to come to the other side of
the world to drink Italian wine, but we decided that we'd go with
the best pairings. We've actually found that some of the best
pairings we have come with Australian wines - there's a sparkling
shiraz with the salmon that's amazing.

GT: At $525 a head for food, The Fat Duck is the
most expensive restaurant in Melbourne. How do you justify the
expense?
HB: We should probably be charging 10 grand a head for this
because of all the costs of this being built and up and running in
six months. Plus we've brought all our staff out here and had to
house them. It's actually only £30 [just shy of $60] more expensive
than at Bray. It's certainly expensive, I'm not denying that, but
there's a huge cost of producing this stuff. If we were charging
what the real cost was then it would be ridiculous. We couldn't do
it if we weren't being subsidised by Crown.

GT: So how often will we be seeing you in the
restaurant?
HB: I'm here full-time for the first month and after that I'll be
here 50/50 because I still have four restaurants in the UK, plus
the TV, plus the supermarkets, plus, plus, plus. There's plenty to
do.

The tasting menu is a sequence of dishes designed not only to
capture a delicious range of flavours, textures and aromas, but
also to bring multi-sensory appeal, culinary history and a real
sense of theatre to the dining experience.